Tag Archives: 9/11

September 11th has become a day of remembrance in what was formerly the land of the free. The horrific spectacle of the events that unfolded in New York and Washington that infamous day will be forever etched in the memory of our generation. While we did not realize it at the time, it was the day that the United States lost a great deal of freedoms.

The external restrictions that have been imposed on society post 9/11 are well documented. The passage of the Patriot Act has given the government carte blanche when it comes to surveillance and disregard for due process. While these practices have always been employed to some degree, the Patriot Act in a sense legitimized them.

Perhaps more devastating, however, has been the mental shift that 9/11 caused in the thought of US Citizens. Pre 9/11/2001, the US was a place where truly anything was possible, it was the Land of the Free, the sky was the limit. Humankind had just “survived” the Y2K non-catastrophic event and credit flowed freely.

More importantly, though, our minds were free.

Naturally, we can only speak of our own experience, but we would be willing to bet that many who lived these events would agree. Pre 9/11, the United States was a completely different country.

Ironically, 9/11/2001 was the day after we had been laid off from our first job. We had cornered ourselves in Internal Audit, which for the uninitiated, is the first department to get the axe when cost cutting measures are employed. Really, who wants to pay people to tell them what they are doing wrong all day unless they can justify the expense?

We received the memo and our final check on the 10th. On the 11th, we woke up to the first day of freedom that we could recall, turned on Good Morning America, and watched the events unfold. At that point they were speculating that the first tower was some sort of small aircraft accident. A caller from New Jersey was on and said, with a grave seriousness in his voice, that it was not a small aircraft, but a commercial airliner. Then, on live television, the second airplane hit the second tower. We are embedding a YouTube video of this moment for those who did not see it. Please be advised that it is indeed disturbing and skip it if you do not want to be shocked:

It was at that point that we knew something bigger than ourselves was occurring, and God had set us there to PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT WAS GOING ON! We were new to Christianity, true Christianity, and had begun to truly commune with God over the past several months. To those who have not had similar conversations with the creator, this will sound strange, but God does speak quite clearly to those who are paying attention.

Anyway, God said, “It’s time.”

This has set our life on a completely different course, one that you, fellow taxpayer, are now a part of.

Ah yes, we were going to explain why money does not exist, at least not in the sense that most understand it.

The Federal Reserve is set to meet in September. There is an expectation that they will raise interest rates. However, there is also a sense that the economy is somehow still in a funk. What is the Fed to do?

We postulated earlier this year that the Fed would sooner raise interest rates than end its QE money printing programs. We were wrong, QE ended before rates increased. However, we hold out the spectre that, eventually, perhaps this month, the Fed will need to increase its target rate. When it does, it will cause big problems for large banks. Banks will need a buyer for the masses of Treasuries they have to hold as a result of Dodd-Frank. The Fed will buy them at cost (not market, as their market value will be dropping), effectively reinstating their QE program.

They will raise rates on the short end and work to maintain lower than natural long rates. Anything else would spell disaster for the economy.

Why can the Fed employ QE (electronic money printing) in the first place? Because money does not exist. What we use as money is really credit. Credit and Money are opposite elements in the realm of economics. They should cancel each other out.

Now that Money is credit, the productive activities of humankind are aligning themselves in direct conflict with the needs of the natural world. And the chasing of non-existent money is causing humankind to strip mine the earth.

Today we continue to watch the relative calm in both the stock and bond markets with our jaw hanging just inches from the floor. In our estimation, the calm, or homeostasis, is perhaps the only thing that is completely inexplicable under the current state of affairs.

Just what is that state of affairs, you ask? A few off the top of our head:

– Downgrades or the threat of downgrades to nearly every sovereign bond on the planet

– A resulting dearth of quality assets to be used as collateral in the financial system

– A debt based economy collectively attempting to live within its means

– The resulting collapse of the debt based economy

– An imminent war in Persia

But these are simply large events that are leading to a great number of small decisions which are in turn causing more unforeseen large scale events, etc. The result being that, much to the chagrin of the financial authorities, a majority of the world is embracing frugality.

A quick recap for those are joining us for the first time, the powers that be, the current currency regime, rely on an ever expanding amount of debt in order to continue to function. It is a system that is based on trust and blind faith, for it offers nothing of lasting value.

The system is no longer functioning as designed. The reach of the currency regime is shrinking and will continue to shrink until the only ones who maintain faith in it are the most morally decrepit individuals and institutions on the planet. They will continue to trade their increasingly worthless paper until they realize that they are simply shuffling paper amongst themselves, long after they have completely lost any semblance of control that they had on the situation.

Much of this paper shuffling is running through the stock and bond markets, and seemingly these markets are calm. However, the illusion of stability is being maintained at the cost of trillions of new dollars and Euros being created which are rapidly losing value against anything tangible.

In the United States, the dollar will begin to significantly deteriorate sometime in March, according to our crude calculations. The Euro, whose handlers have been late to start the game of shameless currency debasement, is more likely to implode with the European banking system as they gag on the sewage of assets that are on their balance sheets.

The great irony of the current currency regime is that a currency which has attempted to maintain its value will become extinct, shunned for one whose value is plummeting.

The Euro and US Dollar are showing the world the two paths that a currency regime can follow to destruction. It will be interesting to see which car ceases to operate first, the motor that runs out of gas or the one that has its gas tank overflow and goes up in flames.

Either way the economy, which is the motor of the vehicle in the metaphor we have just jumped to, is currently being retooled to run on another type of combustible, one that will last much longer than the current blend of currency gasoline which is nothing more than flammable vapors. If the currency, and the assets which back it have real value, the economic motor will be allowed to run at a more even pace.

Gold and Silver, ready or not, here we come. Until then, the economy is sputtering and running on fumes.

Pearl Harbor

We cannot let today pass without a few brief words about Pearl Harbor. Like 9/11, Pearl Harbor served as a national wake-up call. Both served as the justifications for the largest military actions and suppressions of freedom (which seem to go hand in hand) that America has known.

The explosion of the USS Shaw during the attack on Pearl Harbor, courtesy of the US National Archives

As this day that lives in infamy passes, we pause to honor those who perished in these events and the subsequent military actions which occurred as a result of these events. May they rest in peace, and may mankind learn to avoid the suffering and sacrifices they had to endure at all costs.

Those who hold to such a theory are not only following an indefensible logic, they are hurling the ultimate insult to men and women who have fought to defend Freedom throughout history. For any “stimulus” which has been observed is not the result of the decision of a politician to go to war, rather, it is a result their tireless efforts and indomitable spirits which lifted this and many other countries from the ashes of war.

We pray that more of these heroic efforts and indomitable spirits will not be squandered in Persia.

Much ink is being spilled today in anticipation of what may or may not happen as the 10th anniversary of the events that occurred on September 11, 2001. Here at The Mint, we take the somewhat radical view of the Amish in response to tragic loss. We must forgive. An important part of forgiveness is to avoid making or observing a memorial to the offense. Memorializing an event is to keep it present before us.

As the US Empire is now conducting at least three extremely expensive military adventures which have their origins in the events that occurred that fateful day, forgiveness is probably not on many people’s minds this weekend. Meanwhile, millions of dollars are being spent to memorialize it.

We must forgive. It is our opportunity to choose the tree of life over the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To repair the fateful error made in Eden.

Under the cover of this memorial, we sense that an extraordinary event will occur which will impact the fortunes of many in the US, England, Japan, and Europe and others outside their borders with exposure to their respective currencies.

Debauchery

The Event which we refer to is the coordinated debauchery of their currencies.

For the past four years, the FED, BoE, BoJ, and ECB have been engaged in a desperate attempt to debauch (devalue) their currencies. They have had the predictably mediocre to poor results that one would expect from efforts made by this rare hybrid of an agency which combines the laziness of the banking class with the incompetence of the governing class.

The goal seems simple enough. Print money to pay existing debts and encourage people to spend and to take on new debt. So simple, that each of these Central Banks is currently running at their own pace down this calamitous path with little regard to how the outside world is reacting.

Guess what? The outside world is not reacting as expected.

What they did not take into account, at least until now, was that there is quite a bit of money to be made from the fact that they are all running at different paces down the same path. The nature of international finance is such that one Central Bank’s unbridled effort to debauch its currency leads to an opportunity to profit by borrowing in that nation’s currency and purchasing one of the other three currencies, which undermines the debauchery of the currency that is being purchased.

Stark, as most thinking persons, cannot stomach the debauchery in his midst

This is commonly known as the carry trade, and these large Central Banks have taken all of the guess work out of it for the past four years.

We suspect that these four Central Banks see the immediate need to eliminate interest rate spreads amongst their currencies which will force those who ply the carry trade to purchase currencies outside of this group.

In effect, this ultimate coordination of interest rate policies will cause these four currencies to “peg” to each other, which should assure that the debauchery of their respective currencies will continue unchecked and likely accelerate.

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